I was carrying an armload of groceries under the shrub arch up the street from my house– early daphnes and rose hips– and this one green gritty bitter fragrance hit me and I thought, how do you make a theology? By talking about it all day, measuring its dimensions and sizing up its rivals? How, exactly, did Sara Grant and R.H. Blyth fill their time and minds?

What’s the name, too, of what I have and try to practice, the unassured anti-authority redemption-narrative Zen I don’t want to force on anybody? Are you the things you do? If the most moral people to have ever lived are forgotten (by time “scattering her poppy”), is that my justification for having a day job and mostly just listening and agreeing with life, rather than trying to work as a teacher of values?

I finished Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial this week, where he writes: “There is nothing strictly immortall, but immortality; whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. All others have a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy it self; And the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted, as not to suffer even from the power of it self.”

If it all depends, is a daydreamer as loved by God (say) as a theologian? Saw my own windhover this morning, as I jogged my compost to our alley bin straight at a gliding pigeon, who carried in her beak an oak leaf up to her nest behind tin utility shingles; she seemed to float precisely stationary as all around her the various gravelly bricked-in universe approached with my striding.